Just when you have overdosed on Jesus, just when all possible excuses to blog him would seem to have passed safely, at least until Christmas, behold my belated Easter essay, arisen anew after being forsaken for rugged walks through Irish hills ending in Guinness and song at Ireland’s highest pub.

In Sweden last week, I saw two passions. The first was Bach’s The Passion According to St. John, performed in the Gustaf Vasa Church on Odenplan by the house choir and the royal chamber orchestra. It is a glorious piece, and it was deftly executed in a space that did it justice. Fellow SAIS grad Helena G sang in the choir, an impressive feat that is nevertheless more common than you might expect — Sweden is a nation of choirs, secular echoes of what constituted entertainment in religious rural Sweden until recently (is my wild guess). This love of performing is in the blood, and goes some way to explaining the ability of most Swedes to treat the Eurovision song contest as something other than an exercise in high irony.

The other passion was, of course, Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ — about which I had been compelled to form opinions in advance of its showing here, so I thought I should at least do it the honor of a retroactive viewing.

Is it really fair to compare these two passions? Both pieces run around 2 hours, cover the same story, and hence tell it at about the same pace. Both have been accused of espousing antisemitismHere is a convincing case why Bach’s piece is not antisemitic, even by contemporary standards.. But whereas Bach’s work has maintained a relevance in the 280 years since it was composed, it remains to be seen if Gibson’s efforts have the same lasting power.

Although watching a film in Aramaic and Latin with Swedish subtitles is only marginally less taxing than the Finnish movie I accidentally saw last year, the story is so well known, even by those who temporarily were Christians by accident of birth like myself, that I found the language not really to be an impediment to my understanding of Gibson’s efforts. I only have two problems with his oeuvre: the means, and the ends. Let’s tackle each in turn.

I’ve read many reviewers who tussle with the message, but concede that the film is quite well made. I’d rather not grant it that distinction.

Here’s why: The film promises authenticity. It’s the big selling point, it’s what’s been drawing in the bible belts of the world, heightening the emotional effect for religious audiences when they finally come face to face with their personal Jesus. The movie is interesting to the extent that it is a documentary, or at least a plausible rendition of what transpired. The most touted example of this devotion to realism is that the actors speak Aramaic and Latin — it’s meant to be a constant reminder that what we are seeing is the real thing.

Except that it isn’t, to start the nitpicking. Having made the promise of authenticity, Gibson delivers clichés instead. The Roman vernacular was Greek in Judea at the timeGibson should have read a little more I, Claudius.. In the movie, Jesus has a manicured beard, long hair, western features, and looks rather glam, not unlike Jesuses from the illustrated bibles the Mormons hand out; in real life, Jesus probably looked more like Arafat than Beckham, and he was probably closer to 5 ft rather than 6, and long hair most definitely was not in with Jews thenIf you want to know what I really think of Jesus, read last year’s Easter post..

Crosses were not carried ready-made up the hill, as in the movie; instead, just the crossbar was. The trunks were fixed in the ground, as crucifixions were something of an assembly line process. The spike should have gone through his wrist, not the palm, because — as the Romans knew — the bones and muscles in the hand are not strong enough to sustain the weight of a body.

Evil is depicted as being literally ugly — witness the appearance of Satan as an invalid midget. The bad Jews are caricatured, with the priests sporting noses that are far more hooked and beards that are far more nefarious than the Jews on “our” side, such as the apostles, and Jesus himself.

At the very end, as Jesus rises from the dead, his flesh wounds healed, his beard and hair once again immaculate, we get a special effect right out of Terminator 2: A prefectly circular coin-sized hole through his palm is ready for the dazzling of the apostles, but not until we’re given a good look through it. It’s so cheesy — why couldn’t He fix that too? Either God works in mysterious ways, or Gibson does.

Over and over, Gibson is unwilling, despite the advertising, to deliver a work that departs from convential renditions of Jesus as perceived by orthodox traditions even when these renditions have long been known to be historically false.

My biggest problem with Gibson’s method, however, is in his use of music. He drowns the film in a shmaltzy, muzakked version of world music from the Middle East that has become easy shorthand for eliciting emotional responses in period pieces set in the region. You know it when you hear it — it’s that soulful, nasal wailing.

The pioneer of this soundtrack genre was actually Peter Gabriel, for The Last Temptation of Christ, still one of my all-time favorite movies. Gabriel went out and recorded contemporary Arab folk music, which he then turned it into a great soundtrack. I still get shivers down my spine when, at the end of that movie, we hear “It is accomplished,” and the ululating begins, which then segues into church bells. It is a brilliant compression of the next 2000 years of the story into a single musical momentWe also heard this genre in Gladiator, but there at least I was willing to suspend disbelief, because it was billed as fiction; and the main theme was memorable. Oh for a dogme version of the Passion. . Nothing remotely as memorable happens in The Passion.

So much for means. What about the message?

The torture of Jesus, based on a throwaway line in one of the gospels written a generation after the fact, is portrayed by Gibson as attaining epic proportions. Apparently, it’s not enough that Jesus suffered for our sins, but that he suffered for them beyond the limits of human endurance. The problem with this, theologically, is that if we buy into the realism of the film, Jesus’s torture was nothing special by the brutal standards of the day, nor by the standards of the inquisition, and probably not by the standards of some KGB outpost in Chechnya today.

Odds are that somebody is being tortured to death somewhere on the planet right now. This is of course awful, but is not the main difference between that victim’s story and that of Jesus the fact that Jesus ostensibly died for our sins, rather than that he did so painfully?

I think this is the main flaw in Gibson’s message. In focusing on the extent of the suffering Jesus underwent, Gibson is really undermining his own case for Jesus’s relevance. Is the suffering the main reason why we are supposed to recognize Jesus as the Messiah — for his superhuman feats of enduranceI identified most with Pontius Pilate, the world-weary Roman sent to control a bunch of restless natives and their silly pursuits. I am tempted to see Paul Bremer as a latter-day Pilate, sent out to bring all manner of civilizing influences in return for commodities and hegemony, a bargain the natives seems incapable of appreciating.?

Gibson’s literal interpretation of the gospels also allows very little leeway for alternate takes. At the start of the film, there is a brief moment when we think Jesus could plausibly be projecting inner demons — after all, even the Vatican acknowledges that mental illness is the most likely secular explanation for the experiences of assorted prophets and saints. Instead, by the time Jesus dies, the event is made to coincide with wrathful acts of God more at home in the denouement of Raiders of the Lost Ark.

This, then, is the main difference between the two passions: If you do not believe in the literal truth of the story behind them, only one of them remains transcendent.